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Old April 11th 21, 12:54 PM posted to alt.comp.hardware
Paul[_28_]
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Default Gigabyte BIOS Upgrade F11b BETA solved a lot of diffuse hardwareproblems

Norm Why wrote:
Using that tool, '(05) Reallocated Sector Count' was displayed for the
500GB Samsung EVO SSD, but not for the 500 GB Seagate Barracuda SSD.
It's connected to a different controller, a PCIe (x1) SATAIII card.
Sorry, I thought that 500GB Seagate Barracuda was a HDD.

The HDTune tool is too old to display SSD tables properly.

You were probably using some Toolkit to get that number,
and maybe the Toolkit has the SMART table in it somewhere.

My SSD samples here, tend to have rounded numbers,
like 256GB or 512GB, rather than 250 and 500 values.

The red glow, means SATA commands are coming in. The drive
can still be writing, as it rearranges the data, but the
LED does not light while this is happening. Any LED glows,
indicate your OS is doing something. You would need to
probe further, to figure out whether the operations are
read or write. (Task Manager has I/O columns you can turn
on for this.)

The SSD has a processor inside, and it is running for as
long as the drive has power.

Paul
Thanks again Paul,

I'm still trying to solve some performance issues. Here is:

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 3.0.3 Shizuku Edition (C) 2007-2013 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 byte/s [SATA/300 = 300,000,000 byte/s]

Sequential Read : 181.235 MB/s
Sequential Write : 156.012 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 2.018 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 150.887 MB/s
Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 26.341 MB/s [ 6431.0 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 38.755 MB/s [ 9461.7 IOPS]
Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 127.105 MB/s [ 31031.5 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 106.460 MB/s [ 25991.2 IOPS]

Test : 50 MB [D: 21.7% (101.2/465.8 GB)] (x1)
Date : 2021/04/10 15:58:02
OS : Windows 8.1 Pro [6.3 Build 9600] (x64)

Test of Seagate Barracuda. Note anomalous Random Read 512KB : 2.018
MB/s. Could this low number indicate problem with Seagate Barracuda or
with cable. I'm using a 7 conductor cable, 2 pairs +/- data, 3 ground. Is
my Seagate damaged? Is my cable insufficient? What about 'twinax'? Maybe
my Startech PCIe SATA controller is to blame.

I did "not much of a test here", on a Win8.1 setup and
crystaldiskinfo 3.0.4 and the 512KB results are just
a bit lower than the sequential. There's no huge dive
like in your 2.018 MB/s result.

It's not PIO mode, because that would affect read and write.

It's not error rate, because the other results are
too good for that. Why would it just ruin the 512KB stuff ?

I'm sure by now, you've compared your exact model number,
to graphs already published on the web. And I bet theirs
don't dip like that.

You do see the occasional ATTO that is out-of-sorts. Where
one particular transfer size is not as good as it could be.
But I don't know if that would be 512KB - it would usually
be some smaller transfer size.

See if you can dig up someone elses results for your drive.

And if it were AHCI versus non-AHCI, I doubt that would do it
either. There is a good chance a 512KB read or 512KB write,
would be one "transaction" and multiple packets. Rather than
being some crazy series of tagged queue requests to do the
job.

The cabling is usually pretty good. Only if the cable
is kinked, with a permanent pinch mark, would I be
concerned. This sometimes happens when importing cables,
the cables are wrapped in a bundle, and if some weight
falls on the bundle, the cable could get crushed.

There is a counter in SMART for CRC errors on the cable.
But that counter would be for only one of the two
directions. On a CRC error, there is likely a retransmit
request. I don't think it's an ECC, and repaired on the
spot.

I can't think why that would be.

Paul


Thanks for your thoughts. Here is a picture from Wikipedia. "Cross section
of a SATA 3.0 cable, showing the dual Twinax conductors for the differential
pairs."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twinax...winAxCable.jpg

Better class 6 Ethernet cable is twinax. I would think better SATA 3 cable
should be twinax. What do you think? I can't find such cable anywhere, just
7 conductor.


SATA cabling is nicer electrically than Ethernet. SATA is
a "brute force" technology, in terms of signal processing,
and it's "how fast of a sine wave can I run down a coax".

One thing I like about high speed interconnect, is you
can scope it, and it can be a "blur" and... it still works.
That always freaks me out :-) The trick there is clock
extraction and knowing when to sample the blurry thing.
The 8B10B code gives a bounds on number of edges per
symbol time, that ensures there's something to extract
a clock from.

There's really no excuse for not being able to
recover a signal off that SATA cable.

Paul